Happy 150th Canada, and here’s to you, Uncle Sam

The anniversary celebration 150 years in the making is coming to its big finale, finally. Not that it’s not a good thing to toast such a milestone in the history of a country so obviously successful and admired as ours. All those with the blessing of Canadian citizenship know well what special status it confers.

We are part of a bold experiment in tolerance and cooperation, although one that has seen, since the dawn of Confederation to the present day, more than its share of shameful and regrettable attitudes and incidents. Having grown up in a place that seemed to take pride in its petty bigotry, it’s gratifying to see how Canada has evolved and embraced its diversity.

Those who grew up in the post-war era understand that one of the inherent characteristics of Canada at the time, maybe the most defining, was a profound inferiority complex. This was, we suppose, only natural, being the skinny neighbour of the muscleman next door, the United States of America. Everything about the Americans was terrific, important and amazing compared to us dull Canadians with our meagre population eking out a living in a forbidding land.

We so wanted to be just like the Americans with their bigness and boldness, their souped-up cars, Hollywood stars and sports heroes. Everything we did was measured against the American standard, but we rarely seemed to measure up.

Nowadays, that inferiority complex has given way to what you might say is a deep sense of relief that we are who we are and we are not what they became. Where once it was a hopeful and shining beacon of civilization, America has been overcome by rampant racism, unbridled gun violence, aberrant economic disparity, survivalist healthcare and political extremism. A bit harsh? Maybe.

Ironically enough, it was the American malaise 150 years ago that more than any other historic causality drove Canadian colonial politicians of the day to suck up their differences and unite lest they be absorbed into the U.S. or worse, captured by force. The Civil War, where Americans slaughtered Americans, ostensibly over the right to own and enslave other human beings, horrified the makers of Confederation.

One of the fathers of Confederation, Sir Étienne-paschal Taché, who would not actually live to see the birth of the nation, sounded a warning in a speech in February, 1865, introducing the deal hammered out in Quebec City the previous October.

Taché, an ardent defender of French Canadian rights and a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Patriote rebellion, said if the British North American colonies failed to come together they risked being "forced into the American Union by violence, and if not by violence, would be placed on an inclined plane which would carry us there insensibly."

But what if things had gone differently earlier in history? There was an intriguing article in The New Yorker recently where Montreal-bred journalist Adam Gopnik looked at a couple of new history books that revisit the accepted gospel of the American Revolution as a glorious event creating a wondrous nation dedicated to liberty.

In the piece titled “We Could Have Been Canadians,” Gopnik speculates that had British politics taken a slightly different turn, specifically if the more America-sympathetic Radical Whigs had held power, there would have been no need for the American colonies to take up arms for independence.

“No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner ... no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath ... We could have ended up with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada."

Imagine that. Alas, it was not to be and war between England and the 13 disparate colonies ensued. The American die was cast.

When the fireworks explode across the land on July 1, we should all ponder how the Canada we know today is the product of forces from long ago. Those forces seem to be as compelling and relevant now as they were then.

Happy sesquicentennial, Canada. And spare a birthday wish for our American friends.